Civitas - Two Tests for UK Trade: Does seamless, tariff-free trade boost exports and does distance matter?

16 Sep 2021 10:03 AM

During the UK’s departure from the European Union, debate about UK trade policy was dominated by two assertions:

  1. That seamless, tariff-free trade with the EU was the optimal outcome for UK manufacturing;
  2. That trade grows fastest with countries that are nearest.

In this report, trade analyst, Phil Radford performs two correlations on UK trade data to scrutinise the evidence for these two assertions. By comparing the performance of the UK’s 14 largest manufacturing export sectors in EU and non-EU markets from 2000–2019, the author finds:

Those results lead Phil Radford to draw some significant conclusions in this report:

DOWNLOAD ASSOCIATED PDF